"Dear Ubuntu, for the last couple years life has been good. Every time I've shown you to a friend or family member, they've compared you to what they're familiar with--Windows XP or Vista, mostly--and by comparison you've looked brilliant. Yeah, your ugly brown color scheme was a bit off-putting at first, but once people saw how secure, simple, and reliable you were, the response was almost universally positive. But recently, things have changed ..."

More misconceptions. RPM is a package manager equivalent to the level of dpkg. Red Hat has for a very very long time included up2date. There are others such as urpmi, zypper and so on.

Yum was originally developed by Seth Vidal who was a sys admin is Duke university and it was a modification of the yellow dog updater (hence yum = yellowdog updater modified). Fedora included it a while later along with up2date and for several releases, both were included.

Fedora later dropped up2date and went exclusively with yum. Red Hat hired Seth Vidal and yum has continued to gain more features and performance.

RPM still has several features that are ahead of others including multi-arch support, automatic debug info package generation, file dependencies, delta RPM support and so on. Let's stick to the facts